


Eden

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Asphyxiation, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-16 23:59:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4644870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We used to do a lot of things that I never really thought about until now—until she went missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eden

  
I  


### H Y P O X I A

  
She wanted me to choke her sometimes, watching her twist under me while the blood rushed to her lips. We used to do a lot of things that I never really thought about until now—until she went missing. She could turn up any day with bruises on her throat in the exact shape of my fingers, and everyone would think, _Oh, Hermione, you poor precious thing. We told you so._

It has been raining for weeks, since even before she disappeared. The window overlooking the garden is streaked with it so the world outside is nothing but a blur of greyish green and a white overcast sky—and there along the fence, the roses she planted last spring have begun to fall like bright spots of blood in the overturned soil.

“Draco, oh—fuck, come on,” Asteria whines. I push her head back down to the mattress so I don’t have to see her face anymore, just the pale arch of her back and her straight dark hair threaded between my fingers. It is two in the afternoon, and we are both half drunk.

“Shut up,” I tell her. The best thing about her is that I can treat her like shit and fuck her like an animal but she keeps coming back because she’s in love with me. Anything else she says is muffled by the sheets, and I can pretend she is any other person in the world.

I’m close to the edge now, to forgetting everything in the wet heat of her body. My breath is dragging through my throat, and the muscles in my legs and back are burning, and the sound of our skin smacking together is too loud in the silence of this house. If I just close my eyes I can come, and my thoughts can splinter apart and—and _oh, fuck_ and, and . . .

She used to look up at me from where she kneeled in the soil. The sun would spill over her hair in a halo that was almost blinding in its brightness.

Where has she gone?

I pull out and sway backwards. The taste of wet earth floods my mouth, but I buckle to the ground before I can really make it into the bathroom. The world shifts into sick neon yellow, and for one panicked moment I think I might throw up. My hand is shaking on the ground. A pale bruise spreads out across my forearm like a nebula—fading more and more each day.

“Christ, what the fuck?” Asteria is saying.

“Just get out,” I tell her. The words come out thick, and I suck in a breath and swallow around the tension in my throat.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Get the fuck out, Asteria!” My vision is spattered with black stars. I can feel her hand on my shoulder. She might be saying something, but all sound is caught up in the rush of blood through my ears. Where has she gone, where has she—?

My last incoherent thought is _Something is wrong with the garden._

·

Pansy makes coffee in the kitchen while I sit with an ice pack against my forehead. The cold burns the livid purple bruise from where I passed out and whacked my head on the bathroom tile—a panic attack, I realised almost as soon as I woke up to find Asteria sitting on the edge of the bed, sobbing pathetically with her fist crammed against her mouth as she watched me lie there.

“I can heal that for you,” Pansy says. “You’ll kill yourself if you keep drinking so much.”

“I just want this to be over.”

“I never liked her, you know—your wife. Things are the way they are, though.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“You look like shit,” she says.

“Get off my case, all right?”

She comes out from behind the kitchen doorway and sets two mugs of coffee down so hard that they slosh out onto the faded flower pattern of the tablecloth. Her flat is distinctly feminine, more because of Sally Anne than her, I assume. “Just—ugh.” She exhales and flings herself into the chair across from me. “You’re not making things easy for yourself.”

“I loved her, Pansy—in my own way. You know I did.”

“Stop talking like she’s dead,” she snaps. “Do you know how that makes you sound?”

I pull the ice pack from my forehead, and the heat rushes against my skin and makes it sting. Pansy never pulled the drapes across the glass door leading to the balcony, and it reflects us both against the darkness. The shadows from the lamp create a skeleton of my face. After a moment, Pansy looks up at me and our gazes meet, and I look down into my coffee instead.

“I didn’t come here to be lectured,” I tell her. “No one has arrested me yet.”

“And when they run out of explanations?” she says. “Please, please just act right, Draco. Just try to act right.”

“So what, do you think I killed her?”

“Of course I don’t fucking think—” She swings her hand out and collides with her mug, and the thing spills across the table, rolls over the edge, and shatters spectacularly across the kitchen floor. She shrieks and then covers her mouth. After a moment, she exhales. “You know I don’t think you killed her. You know I don’t. How could you ask me that?”

·

No one talks to me anymore in the office. They barely did before, but now I feel as though I live in an entirely separate universe, as though I was the one who disappeared and everyone has chosen to pretend I never existed at all.

On my desk there is an envelope. It arrived the day after she disappeared, unaddressed. Inside are three still photographs taken through our bedroom window: in them I look like a stranger—a stranger fucking a strange girl in our bed. Whoever took them must have been standing only a few metres away, watching from the garden in the darkness.

Hermione must have seen them before she disappeared. Maybe she was even the one who took them. After all, it is her handwriting scrawled across the back of the last one.

Black ink, tight slanted cursive: _What a lovely view._

·

I was drinking the night she disappeared, which is why I barely remember anything. When I woke up the morning after, my head was cloudy and throbbing, and I staggered into the bathroom and gagged into the sink, and it was only when I saw the blood in the hallway after pulling myself together a few hours later that I realised something was wrong.

Now here I am in our bedroom again, where all things began and ended. The ceiling swims warmly above me, and I feel loose and uncoordinated. She hated me whenever I drank, and she would hate me now, fantasising about her with my hand around my cock like a teenager. My memories are all tangled up as though I am trying to wade through fog, that night and every other night all swirling together.

 _Shh, it’s all right,_ she said, running her fingers through my hair. It was dark and I was dizzy, barely conscious. She smelled like damp spring, like roses and earth. Her lips pressed against my forehead, her body straddling me until I was drowning in her. I was clumsy, fumbling— _Choke me, choke me . . ._

I come in a silent shudder all over my hand.

She used to call me her lover at first—her lover, as though we were casual and detached, as though I was something to be possessed. The past never left us, suffocating the love in us slowly until there was nothing left but a lack of forgiveness. Our marriage was on the rocks for a long time, maybe since the very start.

Afterward, I stand by the window. I never closed it, and the cold late summer air rushes in from the garden. Soon the leaves will turn and everything in the world will be dead.

I am so tired. Sleep never comes easily now unless I drink my way into it, and even then she flits feverishly through my dreams, not close enough to touch. Sometimes I catch myself acting like none of it ever happened. Was she even real at all?

I run my hand across my eyes. For one surreal moment, when I look at my reflection in the window, I expect my face to be smeared with dirt—but it passes quickly, and I exhale into the silence. Along the fence, the last of her roses has wilted and died.

·

There is a press conference nine days after the disappearance. _Has anyone seen this woman?_ I stand to the side while the chief inspector speaks, cameras flashing. This is what comes of living in both worlds: two sets of law enforcement to deal with when something goes wrong. The Aurors have already come by the house and found no trace of anything dark, but no one believes that for a second, anyway.

In the still pictures that come out in the paper the next day, I look hungover and dead behind the eyes—like a murderer.

·

“You’ve really fucked this up,” Pansy says. She spears a fork into a plate of casserole and sets it down in front of me.

Sally Anne sits across from us at the table and pulls off the oven mitts Hermione used to wear. “Please eat something, Draco,” she says. I know she only puts up with me because of Pansy. “You look so thin.”

“No appetite, I guess.”

“He’s a grieving widower, don’t you know?” Pansy says.

“Christ, is this a fucking joke to you?”

“If you would just listen to me and show an ounce of worry—”

“Be quiet, please,” Sally Anne whispers. “Please, the houses are so close together here.”

“Not a single person aside from us believes your story,” Pansy says. “Not anyone who matters at all.”

“You want me to play pretend or—break down crying?”

“Yes, if it keeps you out of prison.”

“Shut the fuck up, Pansy, honestly.”

“Maybe you did kill her. You’re acting like a goddamn sociopath—”

My fork clatters to my plate and shatters the tension all at once. Across the table, Sally Anne is wringing her hands and glancing between me and Pansy like a startled doe. Her parents were nonmagical, I remember. I wonder if she even believes me at all.

“I’m sorry, all right?” I say. I feel hollow, wilted. “I wish none of this ever happened.”

“Draco, I just want to protect you,” Pansy says. She means it, I know—the way she just wanted to protect me in school when I got in over my head, the way she wanted to protect me from marrying the golden girl who could love me but never really forgive me. I know what she means most of all is _I just want to protect you from yourself._

·

I never told the police about the muddy footprints, not the Aurors or the surly inspector who took my report. I convinced myself that she had been out in the garden and tracked them in, and I spelled them away before I really realised anything was out of place that morning—before I saw the tiny drops of blood trailing down the hallway.

That is what I tell myself.

Tonight I dream she is here in our bedroom, lying beside me in our bed and cradling me against her chest as though I am a child. _Do you hate me for this?_ she asks, her lips pressed to the crown of my head.

 _I hate you for everything,_ I tell her.

She pushes me onto my back and glides over me like an apparition, hiking up her white shirt and reaching between us. It feels like coming home after a long absence. My breath leaves me in a rush. The scent of her consumes me until I am suffocating in it—thousands of roses.

 _Oh, Draco,_ she says. _I love you, too._

·

The days pass in lengthening silence and the smell of wilted flowers as the last of summer rains itself out. The investigation hits dead end after dead end, and the detective tells me this over the phone the way a father explains something to a child—as though I am not expected to understand, as though I might throw a tantrum because of it.

He tells me, “We need to ask you a few more questions.”

·

I lean against the kitchen table in the darkness, alcohol still burning the back of my throat. My head hurts, my thoughts are spinning. I think I might be sick. The phone is slipping from my hand.

“Draco, are you—do you need us to come over?” Pansy says. She sounds sleepy. Did I call her? The receiver clatters to the floor, and I can hear her yelling.

I fell in love with her mind first. Hermione and I understood one another, both fiercely intelligent and stubborn, both needing to be wanted more than anything else in the world. I was looking for something without knowing exactly what it was—looking for someone who would make me repent for every sin I had ever committed. There was some deep defect in me that needed to be recognised.

I knew she was going to tear me apart, and I was going to let her do it.

That night, I remember—my head hurts, I . . . where has she gone? My hands are around her throat, and her fists pound over and over against my forearms. She is somewhere just beyond reach, flickering along the edge of my memories, roses spilling across her thighs . . .

My hands are raw and muddy when Pansy finds me clawing my way through the soil by the fence.

“Draco, come inside,” she hisses. “Please, please—” She is pulling me up, pulling me away from the garden. “Jesus Christ, are you crying?”

I run my dirty hands across my face. I am crying, after all. My head hurts, my chest hurts. “Fuck, Pansy—oh, I’m fucking losing it . . .” My voice comes out in a strange whine.

“Just come inside,” she says. Behind her, I can see Sally Anne in the window, holding the phone, her fingers hovering over the concerned O of her lips. She is speaking to someone. “Draco, please just—”

“No, I have to—I remember, she . . .” The dirt scrapes under my nails, and it smells like dead things.

Sirens wail in the distance. The air is muggy with more rain. My fingers brush against something soft and wet, and the neighbours beyond the fence are turning on their lights, and Pansy is pulling at my shoulders again. “Holy fuck,” she says, her voice like a shriek now. “Leave it, no—oh my God.”

My vision collapses down to the single point where my hands lie buried in the soil. There it is, the answer to everything: the white edge of her shirt coming up from the earth like a flower about to bloom.

  
II  


### F O R G E T   M E   N O T

  
You ran your fingers through my hair and kissed my neck, breathed against the hollow of my throat—showed me you loved me in so many ways. There was a point at which I even believed you. If we could go back to the winter after the war, when we first saw one another as adults instead of scared children, would we make all the same choices?

You kissed me as though I was a challenge to be overcome.

The night you asked me to marry you, we were lying in your bed, our bodies tangled up. The power had gone out for a few blocks because of the snow, and everything was so dark and quiet that we could have been the only two people in the world.

 _I won’t survive you,_ I told you. _I love you too much._

You pressed your lips to my forehead and sighed into my hair, and we married one another anyway—but I was right, and you knew it. There were too many memories between us, too much hatred that had starved itself into something infinitely sweeter but never truly died.

The bathroom light flickers in this motel room, and the faucet drips as steady as my heartbeat. The overtired stranger staring back at me in the mirror—would you recognise her, or has your wife been dead for two weeks now, rotting in the garden outside your window while the rain floods the flowerbed?

·

The plastic waiting room chair presses against my spine. If I close my eyes against the overhead fluorescents and focus on the sound of the child knocking building blocks together aimlessly in the corner, I can swallow the fluttering tension in my throat.

I have charmed my hair bottle blond and changed the shape and colour of my eyes. I have used a false name. In the frosted window of the clinic, my reflection is a stranger. One other woman waits across the narrow room, and she scoops her toddler into her lap and gives me a brief flicker of a smile when our eyes meet.

The muted television in the corner is overly bright—so bright that it washes the colour out of everything. _You look deranged_ is the first thing I think when I see you, in the brief second during which two officers steer you from the patrol car to the station. You are wearing jeans and an old shirt, your hair unkempt, a blond shadow of stubble across your jaw.

 _Husband arrested in connection with disappearance,_ the headline reads.

“Such a shame, isn’t it?” the woman says. Her hair is coming loose from her ponytail, and her toddler has curled up against her chest—tiny, fragile. I press my hand against the base of my ribs and inhale.

“Yes,” I say. My breath comes out in a rush. “Such a shame.”

·

You have always been a coward, and I understood that about you. I knew you, I knew you, and I knew you were fucking Asteria before I saw you together in our bedroom. Like Eve in the garden, you could never allow yourself to be completely at peace, so you created your own serpents.

The first was alcohol, and the second was her. She was beautiful and attainable. I understand why she appealed to you, never asking more than you could give, never making you question yourself like I did. You told me you loved all of me, my stubborn will and the constantly whirring mind that kept me up nights—but did you really want a person you could feel nothing for, instead?

Through the window, the air humid and buzzing with the sound of cicadas in summer, I watched you bend her over our bed. The camera was smooth and warm in my hands. Your cheeks flushed high with colour, and your jaw tensed, and I clicked the shutter: three perfect images swimming into view in the filmy grey surface of the photographs.

·

I watch the television obsessively for the next few days, curled up in my motel bed as they show the same static footage of police tape in our back garden. No body, no murder—but the circumstantial evidence will be enough to ruin you.

There is a fine balance in our history. If I still close my eyes and see you standing over me in the basement of your old home, how could our love for one another ever be anything but grasping and desperate? You hate me because there is no reason to hate me. You hate me because I have always had every reason to hate you.

Our pasts hollowed our love out like a bleached bone drifting on the tide.

The third time we slept together, you held me against your body and told me I was yours, fucking yours, _oh, fuck, Hermione, yes_ —and I pushed your hair out of your eyes and kissed your forehead hard. We suffocated one another so slowly that neither of us realised it was happening until we were half dead.

Can you understand now?

·

Harry answers the door wearing briefs and a T shirt, his hair sticking up in sleepy dark angles. For a moment, we just stare at one another across the threshold. It is raining so hard outside that my clothes are dripping wet. He watches me the way someone watches the sun rise.

“Oh my God,” he says. “Hermione, oh my God, come in.”

His flat is cluttered with takeaway boxes and empty bottles, a blanket draped across the couch. His arm is strong around my shoulders. He pushes old newspapers off the armchair and lowers me down like an invalid.

“Are you hurt?” he says. “Where have you—has someone hurt you?”

I look away and know he is still watching me. I run my hand across my eyes even though I am not crying. “I couldn’t do it anymore, I just couldn’t.”

He stands abruptly and knocks over a bottle by the foot of the chair, and it rolls across the carpet and clatters to a stop on the kitchen tiles. I wonder whether he has been drinking ever since I disappeared. “I need to call the police and—and the MLE. Everyone thinks you were abducted, Hermione.”

“I know, I—” My fingers flutter across his wrist. “Harry, wait, please.”

“Hermione, was he hurting you?” He kneels in front of me, between my knees, his hands tight on my thighs. Behind his glasses, in the lamplight, his eyes are electric green.

I lean forward and bury my face in his shoulder. “Oh, Harry, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to tell you about it.”

“You can tell me anything,” he says. “Anything, Hermione.” He strokes the back of my neck. I can feel his pulse racing in the hollow of his throat against my cheek—his skin is hot, and he smells like soap and alcohol. I exhale.

I have known it for so long, from the very first time he started pulling away from me when I touched him, as though he could lie to himself if he tried hard enough. I press myself against him, his hips between my thighs, and he breathes out my name as though releasing a weight from his shoulders.

I love you, but sometimes you have to hurt the ones you love.

“Harry, I . . .”

I close my eyes. His kiss is soft—hesitant, then harder. I run my hands through his hair. He pulls me up with my legs wrapped around him.

Here it is, an unforgiveable sin.

In the morning, he might remember me as a dream if he remembers me at all: a flickering warm fantasy like any other. My picture will still be in all the papers, and my test results will still be nestled in a folder at the family planning clinic in Manchester, and you will still be in prison, trying to remember what happened that night.

Reality can be bent around memory, and memory can be modified. There are so many spells to be learned if one has the patience for them. 

·

The night I disappeared, I cut my thighs and stained the edge of my shirt with blood before burying it under the roses. I needed a mess, an uneasy hint of violence, and I tracked the dirt and the bloodstains across the kitchen and down the hall before cleaning myself up.

You were sleeping, the lamplight falling across your pale face and the shadows under your eyes. I came into our bedroom and kissed you until you woke up. _Shh, it’s all right,_ I told you. Your pupils were wide and dark and half lidded, and your hands were clumsy on my thighs. You were beyond comprehension, delirious.

 _Where are you going?_ you said. You laid your head against my chest and closed your eyes, running your fingers up and down my body aimlessly.

 _I need to leave you for a while._ I kiss your hair, press myself against you. _Do you hate me for this?_

You have always been stronger than me, even while drunk. You pulled me on top and rocked your hips against me, and you were there and we were together. _I hate you for everything,_ you said.

 _Oh, Draco._ I closed my eyes, breathed out. _I love you, too._

When you came I pressed your hands around my throat, hard enough to leave a bruise where my fingers dug into your forearm. This was the balance, the thing you could never forgive me for, the most horrible thing I could do to you. I said my spells until everything was tied together: my death as neat as a bow in your memory, waiting to emerge.

I can tell you I love you, and you can tell me you love me—and maybe, now, maybe I can believe you.

·

The fields are still violet with lavender, the dawn stretching pale blue and cloudless to the horizon. There is a theory that memory is a collective experience, that humanity remembers itself through _les lieux de mémoire_ , places so steeped in meaning that they transcend themselves and become timeless. You always wanted to take me to France, but I know how fragile memory is—and this place holds too much meaning for me to risk it being tainted.

My father and mother held hands as they walked through this field after my second year. It was like seeing an entirely different part of their lives, outside the dental office or our tiny kitchen or the grocery around the corner where my father always bought me an ice cream in the summer. Here, where the air was heavy with sun and the smell of thousands upon thousands of flowers, they were just two people in love.

My mother said she never wanted children, but I came along and made everything in the world more beautiful. She was the perfect mother, and the thought of having my own child one day and having to live up to her perfect love terrified me. How could I ever be as selfless as her, as my father?

 _Oh, honey, one day you’ll understand,_ she said.

The petals are soft under my fingers as I weave my way through the field. In the distance, the farmhouse where we stayed that summer is lit up, a smudge of warm windows against the sky. I listen to my heart beating, to the rush of oxygen in my lungs, to the other sound so quiet that it isn’t a sound at all.

The only way to walk is forward, through the winding paths that will somehow lead me home.

  
III  


### R O C K A B Y E

  
She will get a diagnosis of prenatal depression, and he will be released from prison, and soon the media will focus on other mysteries. There are wars in foreign countries, plane crashes, corruption, so what will people care about the dysfunctional relationship of a middle class couple in London, anyway?

He will tear out her garden and plant a lawn instead, and she will convert their guest room into a nursery with pale purple walls and white curtains. He will only drink at night, and only rarely to the point that he blacks out. He will burn a white envelope containing three photographs. She will keep a memory in a Pensieve and watch it sometimes when it rains.

·

The first time they saw one another after the war, she brought two coffees to his office and talked to him about history. It was the middle of winter, and she pulled off her bright red scarf and sat in the chair across from his desk. Snow dotted her eyelashes, and her hair curled out from its braid at the nape of her neck, and her cheeks were pink from the cold.

 _Shall we start over?_ she said.

She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

·

In the darkness, she slams her hand against the headboard and bites her lip until blood wells up beneath the skin. He breathes like something feral when he fucks her—silent, eyes closed. He pulls out before he comes and then lies across from her, facing the shadows of rain that streak across the ceiling. She sighs and reaches out to him, and her fingers flutter a millimetre above his chest before she pulls them back.

“I love you,” she says, and she imagines the taste of roses to get the whiskey off her lips. In the quiet, she can hear the steady inhale and exhale of oxygen rushing into his lungs.

She closes her eyes and counts the seconds until he answers.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dramione Remix Round 6 based on _Gone Girl_ , by Gillian Flynn.


End file.
